It is common practice to surround a machining area of a machine tool such as a machining center, a lathe or a grinding machine with a splash guard in order to prevent chips and coolant from being scattered when machining a workpiece. Such a splash guard is often located on the bed of the machine tool so as to surround the machining area in order to prevent the scattered coolant from running down along the inner surface of the splash guard and leaking out of the machine tool.
However, when installing a machine tool, various adjustments are required, including the adjustment for horizontally placing a movable table on the bed and the adjustment for assuring the rectilinear motion of the moving unit in orthogonal directions to each other along X, Y and Z axes. In this process, the splash guard, if covered on the upper part of the bed, is often inconvenient for adjustments. Therefore, in the prior art, a method has been employed in which the adjustments of the machine tool is performed without a splash guard and the splash guard is installed on the bed of the machine tool after the adjustment is finished.
However, if the splash guard is installed on the bed after the adjustments, there is a problem that the bed is deformed due to the weight of the splash guard and the adjustment is spoiled, resulting in the deterioration of machining accuracy.
As a splash guard enabling this problem to be avoided, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 63-62636, for example, discloses a splash guard which is configured of a rear cover fixed on a back of a base of a machine tool to form a screen behind a table of the machine tool and a front cover surrounding the table in cooperation with the rear cover and having legs with castors so as to be movable in relation to the rear cover.
However, in the case as described above where the whole machine tool is accommodated within the splash guard larger than the machine tool, the space for installing the splash guard larger than the machine tool is required, thereby posing the problem of an increased installation space. Since the splash guard is larger than the machine tool, another problem occurs in that the scattered coolant which may run down along the inner surface of the splash guard and may leak out of the machine tool.